I'm reading the second article, "Measuring Responsiveness in Video Games" and it is a really cool experiment. But I think the conclusion is exaggerated. Take a look at the section "CALIBRATION AND MEASURING" where the 3 pictures are. He concludes that the PS3 menu is taking 3/60 of a second to respond, yet the measurements he has show between 1/60 and 2/60th.
The timeline: 1. The first frame is rendered. 2. The user presses the button some time after this. 3. The camera takes a frame. - At this point, he conclused that if the screen updated, it would be 0/60th lag, but of course, that would be impossible. Agreed. 4. The camera takes a frame. Nothing has changed. - At this point, we have between 0/60th and 1/60th of lag, depending on how far into the frame the user was when they pressed the button. 5. The camera takes a frame. The screen has updated. - At this point, we have between 1/60th and 2/60th of lag.
Basically, the software had a 1 frame latency. In the edge case where the system was in the middle of processing a frame when the user hit the button, so the button state had not updated, it took 2/60th - 2 frames. This is basically optimal.
The reason for the incorrect conclusion is demonstrated in the first article. It shows the simplest loop as: 1. Input() 2. Logic() 3. Rendering()
The author seems to assume that these 3 steps happen in different frames. Input is usually handled asynchronously on a totally different clock. The button state is latched immediately, and copied into local state during the Logic() call. So it isn't 3 frames of latency there. Worst case is 2 + whatever the display has.
P.S. Just to restate, I'm not disagreeing with the measurements. The fact that some games have 14 frames of latency is clearly something with the game engine, not the hardware limitations. That is quite sad, and strange that the user doesn't notice it.
Unfortunately history disagrees with you. You can pretty much sum up the superpowers in the world and notice that they are the most open economies. Even China, as evil as they are painted, is not nearly as much of a dictatorship as the likes or Iran, Iraq, etc. Those are the places that can't feed their people and are under the constant threat of war.
In theory, a dictatorship could be more efficient. A perfectly enlightened dictator would distribute money and power in just the right way to maximize the economy, creating a superpower. Indeed, for small periods of time this has happened (Rome) but inevitably, dictatorships suffer from "power corrupts" and that corruption spans the economy.
At least transparency and democracy result in constant shifts in power, that help to minimize the impact of the corruption.
As for getting where they are because resources are cheap...isn't that pretty much how all current and past superpowers came to be?
Is that the case for the US? Yeah... I guess so: slavery, then industrial revolution. Hmmmmm.... Can't argue with that.
I suggest we use this type of approach to determine other values, such as fundamental physical constants. We could have all the computers of the world vote for what they think is the value of say... pi, or the number 2. One computer might think 2 is 1.9999999999999999999979 while another would report 2.000000000000000000001. By averaging these together, we should be able to get the exact floating point value for 2.
The algorithm he created looks a lot like HQX which is used mostly to scale old video games. His algorithm seems generalized to work on high-color images while the HQX algorithms expect something closer to 16-color or 256-color images. HQX probably deals with dithering better.
The whole thing about "square pixels" is just the media angle.
I'm glad to see that part of the article. They even presented to the security guards the very letter that granted the photographers permission, and they were still stopped. The next step is to follow-up on that letter and ask why their guards aren't following their own policies. This was a great experiment: there was no fighting, no harassing the security guards, etc. I really look forward to seeing the result. There is a part of me that hopes hundreds of photographers start going there to try and take photographs.
as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake,
Perhaps you define brilliance differently than I do. I think of it as intelligence, or alternately wisdom. Refusing to revise your thinking after making a mistake is a requirement for higher-level intelligence.
If you mean brilliance as in "shines brightly" without regard to what exactly is shining - then he is definitely brilliant. Everyone knows him, and hears his opinions.
I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games.
I do. Ebert spent his entire life being paid for his opinion on one particular form of art. He is totally out of touch with this other form of art. Yet video games are now bigger than movies, and it is natural for him to fear that his opinions will become less relevant and less valuable than they were when movies were the #1 form of entertainment.
He has three alternatives: Learn video games and render his opinions on them, humble himself by admitting that his expertise does not go that far, or decry that this alternative entertainment medium is not worthy of his illustrious opinion. He chose the cognitive dissonance approach. It absolves him of having to deal with the fact that he isn't as relevant as he used to be.
I have always wondered this myself, but I guesstimate that it would require a lens the size of the Earth. Or the Sun. Or something impossible like that.
The problem is that you can't get details from long exposures. These far-off objects require exposures that are hours long. Imagine taking a 5-hour long exposure of a soccer game: all the players would be blurred. Now imagine that the players are running at the speed of a planet: upwards of 65,000 miles per hour. That is going to be one heck of a blurry picture.
So here is my back-of-the-napkin calculation: This article says they photographed an exoplanet using an 8 meter telescope, with a 4 hour exposure. To get a good picture of a moving object, you need about 1/30th of a second. So we need a lot more light, which means we need a larger telescope. That 8 meter telescope (pretending it is just a circle) is 8*8*3.14 ~= 200 square meters. To get the same amount of light in a 1 second exposure would require 14,400 times more area. (14,400 seconds in 4 hours). Add another factor of 30 to get 1/30th of a second exposure, so the telescope is now 3,456,000 times bigger than the original 200 meter telescope. The exoplanet pictures we have are only a few pixels. So let's say we wanted a 1 megapixel image of the planet, so we need about 1 million times more light, so lets increase the surface area of the telescope another million times. So now the lens is 3,450,000,000,000 * 200 meters = 690,000,000,000,000 meters, which is slightly more surface area than the entire surface of the earth.
And that just gets you a 1 megapixel image of the planet. That won't show you a city. And I bet a 1/30th exposure would be too slow at the speed a planet moves - it would still be too blurry. So I think my estimate of something the size of the Sun was pretty close!
It [Baidu] has announced new plans to hire US engineers to enhance its technical skills and propel its growth globally."
First of all, stating that they will hire Americans certainly doesn't help the image of China being superior. Secondly, what American would want to work for a Chinese company whose job is to censor search results?
You say "IANAL", but you don't seem to grasp what that implies
That is very presumptuous of you, and adds nothing to the discussion. I'm not trying to prove anyone wrong, or predict what a court would do.
I propose that the U.S. does not need hate crime laws because they should already be covered by assault laws. Fortunately, in the US, you don't have to be a lawyer to have an opinion on what laws should be passed. Crazier yet: They let people like me vote!
My own casual knowledge suggests that no judge is going to treat hate speech as "assault" in a legal sense.
I'm glad to know that your casual knowledge is more applicable than my casual knowledge. That is exactly why I posted: in the hopes that someone with more knowledge could clarify why a judge would not rule a hate crime as an assault. My own casual reading suggests that the judge should do so. I'm unclear on why we need a hate crime law. I'm curious if anyone can weigh-in one way or another.
Perhaps an example would help to clarify:
Example 1: White Englishman 1 approaches White Englishman 2, breaks a beer bottle over his car and says "You rowdy dog! If you insult me again, I and my brothers shall knock your block off!" Then he chases him with said knife and White Englishman 2 flees in fear. As far as I can tell, that is assault.
Example 2: White Supremist in KKK robes approaches Black Indie Rapper, breaks a beer bottle over his car and says "You f'ing nigger! If you talk lahk that 'gyen me and mah gang are gunna string you up!" and chases him with the knife. Black Indie Rapper flees in fear. As far as I can tell, that is assault. It might also be a hate crime because it involved racism. I argue that we do not need another law here.
Can someone explain why an additional law would be necessary to cover the second case?
(P.S. Do me a favor - don't reply telling me that I am not qualified to pose the question or render an opinion. If you have no additional information to add, then that's okay we can just leave it here that we don't know.)
Fortunately, my cable TV subscription is ad free! Oh wait, it isn't. Perhaps they should learn from newspapers and magazines, where paying for a subscription gives yo...ohhh.. nope, there's ads there too. How about the DVDs I buy or rent? They have advertisements (marked non-skippable too) at the beginning of the DVD. What about when I pay for satellite radio? Nope, many stations still have ads.
What Hulu is doing isn't any different from the rest of the industry. Paid content is no longer free of advertising. It's more like you get "enhanced" services or something like that.
they had Host Header servers for the low-cost customers.
Which is probably what most servers are. The survey should have excluded sites that used host headers. Those servers may happen to have SSL supported, but that doesn't mean that the customer is paying for it or intending to use it. They are checking sites where SSL isn't really intended to be used, then implying that something is misconfigured. It isn't. Those sites just aren't secure, and aren't meant to be. I be most of them serve up pages that say "Buy this domain now!!!!!111" with an ad banner.
Certs reliably encrypt traffic between the two endpoints. That's the entire usefulness to the two endusers.
You don't need a cert to encrypt traffic. You just need a key exchange algorithm. If that is all we wanted out of SSL, then we would not need certs.
It's all based upon one key falsehood: The idea that a cert "assures" you that you're talking to someone in particular.
A cert is supposed to do that. If that wasn't needed, then the protocol should have been designed to work without a cert at all. The point of the cert was to eliminate the half-way secure scenario where the traffic was encrypted, but someone could be doing a MITM attack. It is pointless to know that you are talking securely to someone if you don't know who it is.
Maybe the goal was too lofty: expecting the certificate authorities to actually check. Expecting people to keep the certificates secure. But that's a political problem, not a technical one. The browsers are doing the right thing: the site claims it is www.foo.com, but the cert says it is www.bar.com. That's an error and the browser should check it. It can't evaluate the likelihood that the issuing authority did the right thing, or determine if the holder of the cert kept it in a secure place. All it can do is evaluate what it knows and inform the user.
pretend (or be bewildered into thinking) that the threat was resolved with the purchased certificate
You are right when you say it wasn't resolved at that moment. It is resolved there only if the cert authority did their job, and if the holder does their job. But the browser can't know that. If there is a way to know for sure, then great, lets put that in place.
This example is often-cited and I am confused. As far as I know, crying "Fire" in a crowded movie house is perfectly legitimate free speech. In some cases, it might save lives. Particularly, if there is a fire.
However, if you do so when there is no fire, you can probably be sued for damages by the theater. This has nothing to do with any restrictions on the first amendment as far as I know.
Pornography is regulated everywhere in the world; the lawmakers of various nations have mostly decided that bestiality, child porn, etc. are not to be allowed.
The laws you site are not regulations of pornography. Bestiality harms animals (and humans too). The law protects them because it is dangerous and immoral. Likewise with child porn laws - they are limitations on what you can do to children, not limitations of what you can do in porn. Similarly, it is illegal to murder someone in the making of a porn film - because murder is illegal.
I know someone already debunked your reply, but I have to chime-in on this.
This citation needed parroting of wikipedia has to fucking stop.
No, it has only begun and it needs to go further. I'm here to learn and discuss. Not to hear some random person's opinions. Part of the problem with today's culture of anti-intellectualism is that opinions are as good as facts. People go onto radio, television, and corporate meetings with completely incorrect opinions and if they play them right, people think they are facts. This is causing innumerable problems. Governments passing bad laws, corporations making stupid decisions, consumers buying the wrong products due to misinformation, voters making bad choices.
Here at Slashdot, I love seeing citations. It makes me feel good that I finally waded through the BS and found a glimmer of truth. And I try to remember the citation for the next time I find myself surrounded by a bunch of people with opinions. Nothing is better than stopping a big highly-opinionated debate with something like "According to the study by Bernz and Wilson in 2008, the correct number is 42."
Headaches, incidentally, is a problem with all consumer home 3D TVs. They will give the vast majority of people a headache after 10 minutes. That's a fact!
[citation needed]
I have not heard of headache problems on 3D displays unless they require shutter glasses.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reading the second article, "Measuring Responsiveness in Video Games" and it is a really cool experiment. But I think the conclusion is exaggerated. Take a look at the section "CALIBRATION AND MEASURING" where the 3 pictures are. He concludes that the PS3 menu is taking 3/60 of a second to respond, yet the measurements he has show between 1/60 and 2/60th.
The timeline:
1. The first frame is rendered.
2. The user presses the button some time after this.
3. The camera takes a frame.
- At this point, he conclused that if the screen updated, it would be 0/60th lag, but of course, that would be impossible. Agreed.
4. The camera takes a frame. Nothing has changed.
- At this point, we have between 0/60th and 1/60th of lag, depending on how far into the frame the user was when they pressed the button.
5. The camera takes a frame. The screen has updated.
- At this point, we have between 1/60th and 2/60th of lag.
Basically, the software had a 1 frame latency. In the edge case where the system was in the middle of processing a frame when the user hit the button, so the button state had not updated, it took 2/60th - 2 frames. This is basically optimal.
The reason for the incorrect conclusion is demonstrated in the first article. It shows the simplest loop as:
1. Input()
2. Logic()
3. Rendering()
The author seems to assume that these 3 steps happen in different frames. Input is usually handled asynchronously on a totally different clock. The button state is latched immediately, and copied into local state during the Logic() call. So it isn't 3 frames of latency there. Worst case is 2 + whatever the display has.
P.S. Just to restate, I'm not disagreeing with the measurements. The fact that some games have 14 frames of latency is clearly something with the game engine, not the hardware limitations. That is quite sad, and strange that the user doesn't notice it.
Unfortunately history disagrees with you. You can pretty much sum up the superpowers in the world and notice that they are the most open economies. Even China, as evil as they are painted, is not nearly as much of a dictatorship as the likes or Iran, Iraq, etc. Those are the places that can't feed their people and are under the constant threat of war.
In theory, a dictatorship could be more efficient. A perfectly enlightened dictator would distribute money and power in just the right way to maximize the economy, creating a superpower. Indeed, for small periods of time this has happened (Rome) but inevitably, dictatorships suffer from "power corrupts" and that corruption spans the economy.
At least transparency and democracy result in constant shifts in power, that help to minimize the impact of the corruption.
As for getting where they are because resources are cheap...isn't that pretty much how all current and past superpowers came to be?
Is that the case for the US? Yeah... I guess so: slavery, then industrial revolution. Hmmmmm.... Can't argue with that.
I suggest we use this type of approach to determine other values, such as fundamental physical constants. We could have all the computers of the world vote for what they think is the value of say... pi, or the number 2. One computer might think 2 is 1.9999999999999999999979 while another would report 2.000000000000000000001. By averaging these together, we should be able to get the exact floating point value for 2.
This article appears every year or so:
A Concrete Solution To Pollution
Green Cement Absorbs Carbon
Dutch Town Lays Air-Purifying Concrete
It's more like trying to measure an watermelon with a yardstick rather than a grape
1 watermelon is exactly 75 grapes.
The only news here is that Stanford is also doing it. The Berkeley article was posted already.
BMI is useless. It took hold because it was a single simple number and was easily understood by the public. But it's just plain wrong. Stop using it.
The algorithm he created looks a lot like HQX which is used mostly to scale old video games. His algorithm seems generalized to work on high-color images while the HQX algorithms expect something closer to 16-color or 256-color images. HQX probably deals with dithering better.
The whole thing about "square pixels" is just the media angle.
This is far from over.
I'm glad to see that part of the article. They even presented to the security guards the very letter that granted the photographers permission, and they were still stopped. The next step is to follow-up on that letter and ask why their guards aren't following their own policies. This was a great experiment: there was no fighting, no harassing the security guards, etc. I really look forward to seeing the result. There is a part of me that hopes hundreds of photographers start going there to try and take photographs.
I apologize for replying to an A/C troll, but just in case anyone is curious:
Video games are bigger than film. I think the first reference I ever saw to this was actually the one on Slashdot.
as oft occurs with brilliance, he will not admit a mistake,
Perhaps you define brilliance differently than I do. I think of it as intelligence, or alternately wisdom. Refusing to revise your thinking after making a mistake is a requirement for higher-level intelligence.
If you mean brilliance as in "shines brightly" without regard to what exactly is shining - then he is definitely brilliant. Everyone knows him, and hears his opinions.
I cannot understand what possesses you to reserve the word art from being applied to games.
I do. Ebert spent his entire life being paid for his opinion on one particular form of art. He is totally out of touch with this other form of art. Yet video games are now bigger than movies, and it is natural for him to fear that his opinions will become less relevant and less valuable than they were when movies were the #1 form of entertainment.
He has three alternatives: Learn video games and render his opinions on them, humble himself by admitting that his expertise does not go that far, or decry that this alternative entertainment medium is not worthy of his illustrious opinion. He chose the cognitive dissonance approach. It absolves him of having to deal with the fact that he isn't as relevant as he used to be.
That's because you are using substandard tin foil. The best tin foils are made of mahogany.
I have always wondered this myself, but I guesstimate that it would require a lens the size of the Earth. Or the Sun. Or something impossible like that.
The problem is that you can't get details from long exposures. These far-off objects require exposures that are hours long. Imagine taking a 5-hour long exposure of a soccer game: all the players would be blurred. Now imagine that the players are running at the speed of a planet: upwards of 65,000 miles per hour. That is going to be one heck of a blurry picture.
So here is my back-of-the-napkin calculation:
This article says they photographed an exoplanet using an 8 meter telescope, with a 4 hour exposure. To get a good picture of a moving object, you need about 1/30th of a second. So we need a lot more light, which means we need a larger telescope. That 8 meter telescope (pretending it is just a circle) is 8*8*3.14 ~= 200 square meters. To get the same amount of light in a 1 second exposure would require 14,400 times more area. (14,400 seconds in 4 hours). Add another factor of 30 to get 1/30th of a second exposure, so the telescope is now 3,456,000 times bigger than the original 200 meter telescope. The exoplanet pictures we have are only a few pixels. So let's say we wanted a 1 megapixel image of the planet, so we need about 1 million times more light, so lets increase the surface area of the telescope another million times. So now the lens is 3,450,000,000,000 * 200 meters = 690,000,000,000,000 meters, which is slightly more surface area than the entire surface of the earth.
And that just gets you a 1 megapixel image of the planet. That won't show you a city. And I bet a 1/30th exposure would be too slow at the speed a planet moves - it would still be too blurry. So I think my estimate of something the size of the Sun was pretty close!
It [Baidu] has announced new plans to hire US engineers to enhance its technical skills and propel its growth globally."
First of all, stating that they will hire Americans certainly doesn't help the image of China being superior. Secondly, what American would want to work for a Chinese company whose job is to censor search results?
You say "IANAL", but you don't seem to grasp what that implies
That is very presumptuous of you, and adds nothing to the discussion. I'm not trying to prove anyone wrong, or predict what a court would do.
I propose that the U.S. does not need hate crime laws because they should already be covered by assault laws. Fortunately, in the US, you don't have to be a lawyer to have an opinion on what laws should be passed. Crazier yet: They let people like me vote!
My own casual knowledge suggests that no judge is going to treat hate speech as "assault" in a legal sense.
I'm glad to know that your casual knowledge is more applicable than my casual knowledge. That is exactly why I posted: in the hopes that someone with more knowledge could clarify why a judge would not rule a hate crime as an assault. My own casual reading suggests that the judge should do so. I'm unclear on why we need a hate crime law. I'm curious if anyone can weigh-in one way or another.
Perhaps an example would help to clarify:
Example 1:
White Englishman 1 approaches White Englishman 2, breaks a beer bottle over his car and says "You rowdy dog! If you insult me again, I and my brothers shall knock your block off!" Then he chases him with said knife and White Englishman 2 flees in fear. As far as I can tell, that is assault.
Example 2:
White Supremist in KKK robes approaches Black Indie Rapper, breaks a beer bottle over his car and says "You f'ing nigger! If you talk lahk that 'gyen me and mah gang are gunna string you up!" and chases him with the knife. Black Indie Rapper flees in fear. As far as I can tell, that is assault. It might also be a hate crime because it involved racism. I argue that we do not need another law here.
Can someone explain why an additional law would be necessary to cover the second case?
(P.S. Do me a favor - don't reply telling me that I am not qualified to pose the question or render an opinion. If you have no additional information to add, then that's okay we can just leave it here that we don't know.)
Fortunately, my cable TV subscription is ad free! Oh wait, it isn't.
Perhaps they should learn from newspapers and magazines, where paying for a subscription gives yo...ohhh.. nope, there's ads there too.
How about the DVDs I buy or rent? They have advertisements (marked non-skippable too) at the beginning of the DVD.
What about when I pay for satellite radio? Nope, many stations still have ads.
What Hulu is doing isn't any different from the rest of the industry. Paid content is no longer free of advertising. It's more like you get "enhanced" services or something like that.
I'd settle for self-adjusting cup holders. I'm on my 3rd car, and I've never found a cup that fits into any of the cup holders.
Correct, IANAL. I am going based on Wikipedia mostly, but some other dictionaries as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault#United_States
In the US, assault is the threat of force. Physical contact is battery. It seems to me that "hate speech" would be a subset of assault.
they had Host Header servers for the low-cost customers.
Which is probably what most servers are. The survey should have excluded sites that used host headers. Those servers may happen to have SSL supported, but that doesn't mean that the customer is paying for it or intending to use it. They are checking sites where SSL isn't really intended to be used, then implying that something is misconfigured. It isn't. Those sites just aren't secure, and aren't meant to be. I be most of them serve up pages that say "Buy this domain now!!!!!111" with an ad banner.
There is a grave misunderstanding here.
Certs reliably encrypt traffic between the two endpoints. That's the entire usefulness to the two endusers.
You don't need a cert to encrypt traffic. You just need a key exchange algorithm. If that is all we wanted out of SSL, then we would not need certs.
It's all based upon one key falsehood: The idea that a cert "assures" you that you're talking to someone in particular.
A cert is supposed to do that. If that wasn't needed, then the protocol should have been designed to work without a cert at all. The point of the cert was to eliminate the half-way secure scenario where the traffic was encrypted, but someone could be doing a MITM attack. It is pointless to know that you are talking securely to someone if you don't know who it is.
Maybe the goal was too lofty: expecting the certificate authorities to actually check. Expecting people to keep the certificates secure. But that's a political problem, not a technical one. The browsers are doing the right thing: the site claims it is www.foo.com, but the cert says it is www.bar.com. That's an error and the browser should check it. It can't evaluate the likelihood that the issuing authority did the right thing, or determine if the holder of the cert kept it in a secure place. All it can do is evaluate what it knows and inform the user.
pretend (or be bewildered into thinking) that the threat was resolved with the purchased certificate
You are right when you say it wasn't resolved at that moment. It is resolved there only if the cert authority did their job, and if the holder does their job. But the browser can't know that. If there is a way to know for sure, then great, lets put that in place.
This example is often-cited and I am confused. As far as I know, crying "Fire" in a crowded movie house is perfectly legitimate free speech. In some cases, it might save lives. Particularly, if there is a fire.
However, if you do so when there is no fire, you can probably be sued for damages by the theater. This has nothing to do with any restrictions on the first amendment as far as I know.
What am I missing?
The US has laws against hate speech too, but they go by other names such as libel, slander, and assault.
Pornography is regulated everywhere in the world; the lawmakers of various nations have mostly decided that bestiality, child porn, etc. are not to be allowed.
The laws you site are not regulations of pornography. Bestiality harms animals (and humans too). The law protects them because it is dangerous and immoral. Likewise with child porn laws - they are limitations on what you can do to children, not limitations of what you can do in porn. Similarly, it is illegal to murder someone in the making of a porn film - because murder is illegal.
I know someone already debunked your reply, but I have to chime-in on this.
This citation needed parroting of wikipedia has to fucking stop.
No, it has only begun and it needs to go further. I'm here to learn and discuss. Not to hear some random person's opinions. Part of the problem with today's culture of anti-intellectualism is that opinions are as good as facts. People go onto radio, television, and corporate meetings with completely incorrect opinions and if they play them right, people think they are facts. This is causing innumerable problems. Governments passing bad laws, corporations making stupid decisions, consumers buying the wrong products due to misinformation, voters making bad choices.
Here at Slashdot, I love seeing citations. It makes me feel good that I finally waded through the BS and found a glimmer of truth. And I try to remember the citation for the next time I find myself surrounded by a bunch of people with opinions. Nothing is better than stopping a big highly-opinionated debate with something like "According to the study by Bernz and Wilson in 2008, the correct number is 42."
Headaches, incidentally, is a problem with all consumer home 3D TVs. They will give the vast majority of people a headache after 10 minutes. That's a fact!
[citation needed]
I have not heard of headache problems on 3D displays unless they require shutter glasses.